Famous Reviews eBook

But ask not to what doctors I apply—­
Sworn to no master, of no sect am I.
As drives the storm, at any door I knock;
And house with Montaigne now, and now
with Locke.

That is, neither one poet nor the other having, as
regarded philosophy, any internal principle of gravitation
or determining impulse to draw him in one direction
rather than another, was left to the random control
of momentary taste, accident, or caprice; and this
indetermination of pure, unballasted levity both Pope
and Horace mistook for a special privilege of philosophic
strength. Others, it seems, were chained and coerced
by certain fixed aspects of truth, and their efforts
were over-ruled accordingly in one uniform line of
direction. But they, the two brilliant
poets, fluttered on butterfly wings to the right and
the left, obeying no guidance but that of some instant
and fugitive sensibility to some momentary phasis
of beauty. In this dream of drunken eclecticism,
and in the original possibility of such an eclecticism,
lay the ground of that enormous falsehood which Pope
practised from youth to age. An eclectic philosopher
already, in the very title which he assumes, proclaims
his self-complacency in the large liberty of error
purchased by the renunciation of all controlling principles.
Having served the towing-line which connected him
with any external force of guiding and compulsory
truth, he is free to go astray in any one of ten thousand
false radiations from the true centre of rest.
By his own choice he is wandering in a forest all
but pathless,

—­ubi
passim
Pallantes error recto de tramite pellit;

and a forest not of sixty days’ journey, like
that old Hercynian forest of Caesar’s time,
but a forest which sixty generations have not availed
to traverse or familiarise in any one direction....

Here would be the most advantageous and remunerative
station to take for one who should undertake a formal
exposure of Pope’s hollow-heartedness; that
is, it would most commensurately reward the pains
and difficulties of such an investigation. But
it would be too long a task for this situation, and
it would be too polemic. It would move through
a jungle of controversies.... Instead of this
I prefer, as more amusing, as less elaborate, and
as briefer, to expose a few of Pope’s personal
falsehoods, and falsehoods as to the notorieties of
fact. Truth speculative often-times, drives
its roots into depth, so dark that the falsifications
to which it is liable, though detected, cannot always
be exposed to the light of day—­the result
is known, but not therefore seen. Truth personal,
on the other hand, may easily be made to confront
its falsifier, not with reputation only, but with the
visible shame of refutation. Such shame
would settle upon every page of Pope’s
satires and moral epistles, oftentimes upon every
couplet, if any censor, armed with an adequate knowledge